tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1 2010-08-25T13:09:19Z Movable Type 3.35 tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2008://1.38 2008-11-23T14:13:51Z 2008-11-24T02:47:26Z

I seem to recall that Condi Rice occasionally used to slip and call George W. "my husband." That's one slip that Hillary will never make. Even though I supported Obama in the primaries and was furious at the Clintons for...

Eileen The Wire. I couldn't have been happier, because any president whose favorite show is The Wire has to be planning to do something drastic to improve the lives of young people in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. My bet is that Obama chooses Colin Powell to head the Department of Education, and that Powell will love the job and advocate approaches that no one has tried before. Wire fans, doesn't Colin Powell remind you of Bunny? Can you imagine how much better the schools in Baltimore and Detroit--and everywhere else--would be if Bunny were in charge? Finally, I suggest that Obama continue his attempts at reconciliation with his former enemies by appointing Sarah Palin as his administration's Bounty Hunter in Chief. After providing her with the weapons of her choice and a full wardrobe of the most up-to-date, James Bondish camouflage outfits and gear on the market, President Obama should send her on a mission to seek out and destroy a real terrorist ... Osama bin Laden. Just think of Osama as a moose, Sarah. Or a wolf. Or a turkey. And do whatever it takes to bag your game. A grateful nation will await your return. But here's the part we're not quite sure you can handle. First, you will need to be able to find Afghanistan on a map.]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2008://1.39 2008-11-29T21:24:36Z 2008-11-29T21:34:53Z

When John Kerry lost in 2004, people left up their signs to signal that they were angry. They hadn't voted for Bush and Cheney. They wouldn't be responsible for whatever disaster happened next. This time, people kept Obama their signs...

Eileen Our guy finally won. And now, as the cold, gray Michigan winter descends upon us and everyone braces for the shock of General Motors going bankrupt, we're keeping out our signs as a sort of a plea or prayer. Obama, don't forget us. We're out here in the dark. Please visit us, come down our chimneys, and bring us what we need.]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2008://1.40 2008-12-03T15:28:38Z 2008-12-03T15:45:11Z

Dear Barry, I know, your name is Barack. It's just a bad habit. I love the name Barack! And I didn't need Sarah S. to remind me that it means lightning in Hebrew. (That slut. She thought she was so...

Eileen trying very hard to be the class clown. I didn't need Sarah to explain why, when you and I got introduced, that name of yours zapped me with an electric thrill and I knew that even though on the outside we don't look much alike, inside we have so much in common. I just got in the habit of calling you "Barry" in case my officemate, Shira, glanced over and caught me writing you another message, back in the old days, when she and the other girls were backing Hillary and would have called me a traitor for preferring that a man (even a black man!) get promoted over our heads (again). Now they understand why I loaned you so much money, even though you earn way more than I do, or why I devoted so much time and passion to a married man who will never leave his wife. If anything, my girlfriends were jealous that I was the one you were sending five, six, sometimes seven (!) messages in a day. (Ha! Take that, Joanie! Now do you still think he "just wasn't that into me"?) It killed them that I was the one getting a constant stream of email saying how grateful you were that I'd been there for you from the start and in just a few more dollars (I think you meant "days," Barry!) you could make me an honest woman and set me up, if not in the fancy mansion that goes with your new job, then a little house of my own, without that mortgage guy from the bank breathing down my neck, and you could list me as a dependent on that gold-Cadillac-plated insurance of yours, and throw me a few extra bucks a month so I could pick out something classier than the usual TJ Maxx and I won't need to feel like a complete loser when that JAP Sarah prances in to the next goodbye party at the office and starts batting her fake eyelashes (oh please, don't tell me you thought those things were real?) and stands on the tippy-tippy toes of those eight-hundred-dollar Manolos and whispers her dirty little nothings (and I do mean nothing!) into your adorably too-big ears (we should only be saying goodbye to her!). Admit it, I've been patient. Haven't I been content to sleep with that T-shirt you sent, the one with your picture on the front, instead of with you? I don't mean to sound all weird or stalky, but there were times when I googled you every few days (okay, every few minutes) to make sure you were still ahead in the office betting pool, and you were taking care of your health, and you hadn't gone back to smoking, and you were eating enough (but not too much … you promised at the Fourth of July picnic that you wouldn't give in to the pressure to scarf down donuts and pork rinds and too much beer to please our redneck clients out there in the boonies). For a while, I even took to checking your grandma's health a few times a day, and I sent you and Toot my very best vibes (sorry, Jews don't do prayers, but vibes are the next best thing!) when the poor, sweet lady was on her deathbed. (I never met her, of course, but I loved her the way I loved my own Nana, whom my family and I used to visit every Christmas and Pesach in Miami, to which my parents chose not to retire when their own time came, although the reason was not, as a certain bigoted liar we both know would lead you to believe, because they thought there were too many black people and Latinos down there.) Nor, as you may have noticed, have I outed you to your wife. I know you could never leave Michelle, let alone those two outrageously precious girls (whose hair I could totally take care of, if it ever did come to that, since it's so much like my own hair, only the teensiest bit curlier). I could never hurt Michelle! She's cute as a button! And so smart! And she dances so much better than I do! I mean, if I could imagine Michelle getting into threesomes, I would have suggested it long ago. Although if Michelle were that type (which I'm not saying I am, unless you say you are first), you wouldn't have married her, now would you. Although let's face it, if your marriage were everything it's cracked up to be, why would you have sent me all those messages? I know you act all straight-arrow, but maybe, when you visited all those swing states "on business," you did some swinging on the side? Which reminds me, boyfriend, you better 'fess up about that jones you have for Rachel! Don't you deny it! I heard it from Keith, who heard it from Chris, who heard it from the jones herself. That's okay. I'm jonesed out on Rachel, too. Not that I'm, well, you know. Although I would be fine with it if I were. It's more, like, she's so liberal! And so Jewish! Just like me! If Rachel were into threesomes (or foursomes, or anysomes!) I would be so right there in the sheets jonesing with however many of you were in there! : ) Maybe I shouldn't say this, seeing as you might someday be part of my family (I love Michelle, but someone that cute and smart might get snatched up by some guy with better moves than you!), but I got in this really nasty argument with my sister the other day about whether a Jewish girl like me could ever really find happiness with a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan goy, even if he does have a law degree from Harvard. Not only did I convince her I was right, you so won over my parents on that last visit you made to Boca. They couldn't stop talking about how polite you are, how intelligent, how well- spoken (not that they don't expect black people to be polite! or intelligent! or well-spoken!), how much they love your smile (not that they think black people have brighter smiles than white people!), and how much they love that suit you had on (my dad says he can get that label for you wholesale, from his brother, you shouldn't drop a bundle at Neiman Marcus or Armani like that other Sarah, the one who went on a spree with the company plastic, which just goes to prove you cannot trust anyone with that name). Not only that, you totally blew Dad away with that dirty joke in Yiddish! You were such a hit, kidding with them about how they should tell their friends at the club to please vote for the shvartzeh, my mom said to make sure you knew that in our family, we never, ever used that word, and you shouldn't use it about yourself, the word you should use is mensch, although if my sister blabs about what's been going on between us, my mom most definitely will take that back. So, I know you know how much you owe me. Despite what some people in this office think, you're not the type to forget everything I did for you just because you finally got what you wanted. You're not the type to refuse to buy the cow because you can keep milking it for free. When I show up at your big inaugural bash and sashay past those Secret Service guys and tap Michelle on the back and demand the one dance that will have to substitute for the wedding waltz you and I will never have (sob!), I'm sure you won't deny me. No, the real reason I'm writing is because I'm afraid that once you get that damn promotion and you're even busier than you are today, when you're off flying here and there, getting our company back on track and rebuilding our good relationships with all the important clients who dropped us because the last guy was such a dolt, or you're working late, going through the books (which I happen to know are a mess, not to mention they don't show the ridiculous amount your predecessors spent on their fancy-schmancy lunches while the rest of us got by bringing bagels and yogurt from home), well, you certainly won't have time to be sending me so much mail. And even though I'll have that nice new house to live in, and that fancy insurance, and those extra dollars in my pocket, life will be a whole lot less exciting than it's been for these past two wonderful years, when it's only been you and me. The company won't be so dysfunctional. My job will get back to normal. Instead of worrying about what's going on with the NASDAQ, or Putin and Saakashvili, or the nukes in Iran, the surge in Iraq, or the torture at Guantanamo, instead of worrying about education reform, infrastructure repair, renewable energy, global warming, or the appropriate tax bracket for guys like that unlicensed plumber we call in when certain people whose initials are SS insist on flushing their tampons down the toilet (I forget the guy's name … big bald dude who keeps asking what it is about black guys that makes white chicks get hot and bothered, seeing as he happens to know, from his line of work, that the myth about black guys being supercircumcised isn't true), I'm going to be reduced to worrying about this mole on my upper lip, or playing computer solitaire, or googling the guy I dated for a few months back in '03, when I was working in the Atlanta office, or trying to decide if that chicken parm dinner I bought at Trader Joe's a few weeks ago is still okay to eat, or—despite my vows not to—logging on to J-date yet again to see if anyone with a college degree and uncrossed eyes and something resembling a chin has posted his profile since the last time I logged in and checked. ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2008://1.41 2008-12-29T22:44:41Z 2008-12-29T23:09:15Z

Here's a photo of the dining room at my family's hotel, sent to me by Jeff Brown, who used to work as a waiter at Pollack's (he now sells real estate in southern Florida). You can just hear Elvis...

Eileen Here's a photo of the dining room at my family's hotel, sent to me by Jeff Brown, who used to work as a waiter at Pollack's (he now sells real estate in southern Florida). You can just hear Elvis on the record player that Jeff and his brother played while clearing away the remains of breakfast and setting up for lunch. (Additional facts that might interest a few former Pollack's guests and employees: Gary Norkin was the headwaiter; Jeff Brown and his brother went on to form a rock band and perform at the Pines and Eldorado, as well as the semi-famous Battle of the Bands that took place in Ellenville, NY, in 1967.) Despite owning this hotel from 1918 to 1969, my family has virtually no photos of the place, so if anyone else does, I'd love if you could send them!]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2008://1.42 2008-12-29T22:53:17Z 2009-01-21T02:42:43Z

I'm very happy to announce that IN THE MOUTH has just been selected to receive the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for a significant contribution to Jewish literature. I'm especially proud to join a list of winners that includes some...

Eileen Edward Lewis Wallant Award]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.43 2009-01-11T21:05:19Z 2009-01-11T21:35:01Z

And another nice piece of news... In the Mouth has just been selected as a finalist for the Sophy Brodie Medal, awarded by the American Library Association to an author whose work represents "the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature...

Eileen In the Mouth has just been selected as a finalist for the Sophy Brodie Medal, awarded by the American Library Association to an author whose work represents "the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature for adults" that year. The winner will be announced in another few weeks. In the meantime, here's a link to the website: Sophie Brody Medal]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.44 2009-02-03T20:45:28Z 2009-02-03T20:49:09Z

Marian took me to the auto show in Detroit, just as the show was closing, and as we wandered the gigantic convention floor full of gleaming sports cars, adorable electric putt-putts, and trucks whose tires stood taller than my head,...

Eileen Grand Torino, a movie I never would have appreciated before I moved here. I would have dismissed a retired Polish autoworker like Walt Kowalski as an uneducated bigot who had worked with his body all his life because he was too thickheaded to get a better education and whose only method for solving problems was to curse people, beat them up, or shoot them. But the neighborhood Marian grew up in isn’t far from the street where Walt Kowalski lives, and his father could have played the part. True, his father worked for the auto industry as an architect rather than on the line. But he abides by much the same code as Walt. At 86, he only recently gave up playing hockey. Like Walt, he’s obsessive about the appearance of his house and lawn; he used to mow his grass religiously … with a scythe. And given what I know about his resistance against the Nazis and Communists before he and Marian's mother walked out of Poland, even if he muttered beneath his breath about his neighbor's religion or ethnicity, he would probably risk his life to help the guy. Before I moved to the Midwest, I wouldn't have understood an autoworker’s pride in the cars he made or why he might have wanted to toss a rock at the Corolla I was driving. I grew up in New York and couldn't have found Michigan on a map. My uncle owned a Pontiac dealership in Queens, and, like a teenager who still believes the stork brings babies, I assumed that automobiles came from Long Island. I also was brought up to think that anyone with ambition or smarts would acquire an education so he or she could sit behind a desk rather than stand on an assembly line. What kind of parent would discourage his kids from attending college on the grounds that if a factory job was good enough for him, it was good enough for them? Such an ethos seemed nonsensical until I met people who believed they deserved respect for being tough enough to withstand a grueling day of labor and whose joy in life derived from spending time with their families or sipping beer and barbecuing sausages with their friends in their well-maintained back yards. Why spend all those years in college learning things you might never use if you could earn a better wage making cars? Bad enough that people who like to buy nicely packaged steaks and boneless, skinless chicken don't want to know who slaughtered those cows or skinned those chickens. How can consumers denounce the workers who manufacture the products they want or need for demanding to be paid not only a subsistence wage, but enough to be able to afford a decent house and medical care? Easterners tend to think they know the Midwest better than Midwesterners know it. I once sent a novel to an editor in New York and was amazed when she circled a passage in which the characters huddled in their basement to avoid a tornado, as my son and I used to huddle in our basement when the sirens blared. "THERE ARE NO TORNADOES IN THE MIDWEST!" the editor scrawled in red. I find it difficult to sit still while people back east quote erroneous statistics about how much auto workers supposedly make per hour or Southern politicians brag about how they don't need to ask for handouts because their factories produce automobiles more cheaply than ours, as if one reason for that disparity weren’t that Southern factories get their electricity at a cheaper rate because it derives from government-financed TVA projects. Anyone who lives here knows there's plenty of blame to go around. When Marian and I drove to Chicago a few weeks ago, we left his Explorer home because my Toyota gets so much better mileage. When we hit a pothole and got a flat, we changed the tire much more easily than the owners of the American-built SUVs that hit that same pothole because their spares were located underneath their vehicles and had rusted in place. But before you hold autoworkers responsible for the unavailability of a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon without contributing to global warming, before you fault them for thinking that Americans might still take pride in working with their bodies, before you deny them government support to enable them to train for jobs in an economy yet to come, maybe you ought to slip behind the steering wheel of their lives, take a test drive ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.45 2009-05-02T12:26:42Z 2009-05-02T12:31:02Z

I hope you will pardon my immodesty, but I am going to post the text of the speech given by Mark Shechner, one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which I won this year for IN THE...

Eileen I hope you will pardon my immodesty, but I am going to post the text of the speech given by Mark Shechner, one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which I won this year for IN THE MOUTH. I read this whenever I get too depressed to sit down at the computer and write. Presentation of Wallant Award for Eileen Pollack for In the Mouth. In the sort of work that Thane and Vicki and I do in making these decisions on behalf of the Wallant Committee, there are no rules of reading and judgment. Yes, of course, the purpose of the prize is to promote the work and the name of a Jewish writer whose writing is either just getting underway or, for one reason or another, underappreciated. They haven’t achieved the national acclaim that in our estimation their writing deserves. So, the uncovery of the unknown or underappreciated is of course a ground rule. Apart from that, we have no guiding instructions, no shared principles, no dominant aesthetics, no imperatives of subject matter or cultural orientation. We don’t bring any fancy equipment or theories to our work. ... we apply the only test we permit ourselves: the reader’s test, which any of you might apply as well in our place. The book we are looking for is one that says to us: “Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” I suppose then that reading is not much different from falling in love or buying a car. We settled by easy consent on Eileen Pollack’s collection of stories, In the Mouth. In it, Eileen Pollack has managed to take the lives of retired Jews and reveal the strangeness and desperation of aging. Yes, she writes of other things too, but the stories of aging Jewish men, usually dentists, leave indelible marks, like ornate tattoos, in the reader’s mind. She presents us, for example, with Milton Rothstein, a retired dentist dying of AIDS that he picked up from a Latina woman who had been at one time a hooker. Another Jewish man kills himself years after taking the life of a Chinese worker whom he had gotten pregnant in his work place. Both of these stories are set in Boca Raton, that mellifluous Spanish name for “Rat’s Mouth,” but which one of Pollack’s characters calls “Boca Loca.” And with good reason. Boca was never more loca than in Eileen Pollack’s stories. In other stories, we discover Siamese twins who share a 3-chambered heart. We have a mother whose milk won’t come for her own baby but will come for the baby of another woman. (Is this the ultimate milchige story?) We have an old Jewish man who turns out to have lied about his past all his life and now wants his son to arrange a bris for him so that he can be buried in an orthodox graveyard next to his wife. (So, a fleishige story next.) Such situations reflect Milt Rothstein’s late life bitter observation: “I never read a single true word about getting old. Not in any book. Not in any newspaper. The truth about getting old is that every single person you’ve ever loved dies. And you’re not supposed to care. It’s the natural order of things. Well, let me tell you. When every person you’ve ever loved dies, you feel like dying with them.” Pollack’s characters are tormented by age and its losses and its strange turns. And along with those who are younger, they are tormented by sex: the sex they get, the sex they don’t get, the sex they no longer get, and the sex that kills them or drives them to kill. The body ages, but eros never dies. However, Eileen Pollack doesn’t give us sociology-as-fiction, though there is plenty of that to be found. She gives us the world she knows – the world of aging Jews, and her Boca Loca is an imaginary condo with real Jews in it. So it is no surprise to find her blurbed at the back of the book by such a writer as Lorrie Moore, since Moore is one of the writers she reminds me of. But the writer she calls most to mind is Bernard Malamud, and I remember thinking to myself as I read “Bris,” “This is Malamud reborn. A true transmigration of souls, the soul of one leaping mystically into the body of the other, almost like the birth of a Dalai Lama. The voice is his, the rueful human predicaments are his, the tragic-absurd universe is his, the Catskill Kafka is his, the intimations of mortality are his, the gall bladder attacks of reality are his, as is the incurable heartburn of love, the fusion of the gemutlich and the meshugah is his, the ordinary world transfigured into something tabloid-strange is his, Pollack’s way of turning the plain borscht of experience into the Manischewitz Kosher Wine of art recalls him. The distant God who presides like a cosmic Sid Caesar over the great comedy special of piety and pratfall recalls him. Certainly the story “Bris” could be bootlegged into the next Malamud anthology and nobody – nobody but us – would know the difference. And I find myself smitten by the voice: the intentionally style-less style. The utterly confident plain speech whose metaphors are so casually a part of the voice that they never have to announce themselves. A wholly self-assured writer, Eileen Pollack lets the situation do the work: she is a situation writer rather than either an action writer or a “slow-down-for-the-glorious-texture-of-life” writer. She can do the latter: there are plenty of fully-realized tableaux in the stories, and I particularly admire the way she handles the banter between old Jewish men. There is no corresponding banter among her women, and a woman has to join the company of men, as on a golf course, to enter into the charmed circle of joking, chiding, nudging, and kvetching. But Pollack doesn’t ply us with portentous descriptions that topple over into deep symbols. She simply writes with the human situation always in front of her and lets the human surprises do the work of astonishing us. Her motto could be the motto of Raymond Carver: no tricks. She has an easy way with the English vernacular, and I suspect that the pulse of her prose may owe everything to a childhood in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, where she was born, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist . Though she is a younger writer, Eileen Pollack is saturated in that world of older Jews, the generations of her parents and grandparents and, one senses, generations before. She presents us with something of an old world vision, a world conceived years and years ago in Yiddish and carried out in English In her writing one hears tales of love and duty and trouble and deep intimacy, of domesticity achieved and domesticity squandered. One hears generations of keening, grumpy, joking, lamenting Jews, the criers and the kibitzers, as the late, wonderful writer Stanley Elkin called them. Little wonder that In the Mouth spoke to the judges right away, saying ““Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” And we didn’t. On behalf of Thane Rosenbaum and Victoria Aarons. Mark Shechner tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.46 2009-06-03T17:38:00Z 2009-06-03T17:46:06Z

Recently, I was pleased to learn that IN THE MOUTH was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, and last week I found out that the collection was awarded a silver medal in Foreword Magazine's Best Books of 2008 contest....

Eileen Recently, I was pleased to learn that IN THE MOUTH was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, and last week I found out that the collection was awarded a silver medal in Foreword Magazine's Best Books of 2008 contest. tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.49 2010-01-12T18:05:08Z 2010-01-12T18:07:40Z

This is the only known photo of my family's hotel, other than the photo of the dining room I uploaded to this blog last year. Amazing that in all the years we owned Pollack's, no one thought to take...

Eileen This is the only known photo of my family's hotel, other than the photo of the dining room I uploaded to this blog last year. Amazing that in all the years we owned Pollack's, no one thought to take a picture. Then again, everyone was too busy working there! Both photos, the main entrance and the dining room, came to me courtesy of Jeff Brown, who, in his youth, worked at Pollack's as a waiter.]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.50 2010-04-19T12:17:15Z 2010-04-19T17:56:44Z

A few weeks ago, after nine members of the Hutaree militia were arrested in and around Ann Arbor, an editor at The Times asked me to follow up my series on the election by writing an op-ed piece about militia...

Eileen The Extremists Next Door And here's the original essay, as I wrote it, followed by the photos Marian took of that militia event we attended: The flags flapping above the picnic area warned “Liberty or Death” and “Do Not Tread on Me,” while the man behind the registration table sold bull’s eyes and IRS 1040 forms to be used as targets for the adult and youth shooting contests later in the day. But most of the action at last Saturday’s “Militia Field Day aka Tax Blast: Open Carry Family Picnic & Tea Party,” held at Island Lake Recreation Area in Brighton, Michigan, consisted of militia members and their families chowing down on pulled pork and kielbasa. One militia man squatted beneath a tree, giving lessons on how to start a fire using two sticks. Another played “Dixie” on his harmonica. A tiny girl in pink clutched a stuffed dinosaur with one hand and her father with the other; like most of the militia members, he wore army boots, fatigues, and a big black pistol on his hip. Tax Blast is an annual event. But this year, the emphasis seemed less on riddling 1040 forms with bullets than demonstrating that the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia is in no way affiliated with the Hutarees, an apocalyptic Christian branch of the militia, nine of whose members recently were arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate police officers and kill any nonmilitia members who stumbled upon their reconnaissance operations in the woods. Living in Ann Arbor, I don’t usually feel threatened by the militias. Most members are just indulging their fantasies of being warriors without having to sign up for the army and go to Afghanistan or Iraq. They want to be heroes and save their neighbors from disaster. Many of the guys in the yuppie southeast Michigan branch of the militia consider themselves to be socially progressive libertarians and welcome anyone, Jewish, black, or Muslim, who declares him or herself willing to defend Michigan from invasion, whether by the federal government or foreign terrorists. (The lid on one chafing dish at the picnic read “Kosher Meals Available,” while another dish proclaimed its contents to be suitable for vegans and vegetarians. The kosher dish stood empty until an exceedingly large armed man wearing a black T-shirt that read “When I Snap You’ll Be the First To Go” filled the tinfoil tray with Hebrew National hot dogs.) I even understand some militia members’ fears: I don’t like wiretaps or surveillance cameras, and, during the Bush administration, I often found myself frightened of my own government. But I am chilled to think of thousands of armed militia members from all over the country marching on Washington, D.C., and Virginia this coming Monday to “celebrate” the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and “restore the Constitution.” “PATRIOTS WILL ASSEMBLE IN VIRGINIA AND MARCH ON WASHINGTON ON APRIL 19. THIS WILL BE AN ‘OPEN CARRY’ MARCH. BRING YOUR GUNS. PATRIOTS WILL TAKE BACK AMERICA FROM THE OBAMA OCCUPATIONAL GOVERNMENT,” reads a post to a Rush Limbaugh fan site on Google. “Civil war starts April 19, 2010? Nervous nation waits for armed march on Washington, DC (bang)” proclaims the website of a group called New World Order Fighters. Many of the militia members at the Tax Blast told me they can’t take time off from their jobs to travel to Washington for the protest. But a rifle team leader named Solo, an IT specialist who lives in Troy, plans on attending. He worries that President Obama is going to make an end run around the Second Amendment by requiring every bullet in America to be inscribed with a traceable serial number, or by pricing ammo out of the reach of the common citizen, or by allowing Hillary Clinton to negotiate an international treaty that bides us to the same anti-gun laws that European nations must obey. “I want to let people on the east and west coasts know that people in the middle of the country want to keep their guns,” Solo told me. The timing of the event – April 19 – doesn’t bother him; what bothers him is that “that asshole” Timothy McVeigh “ruined a perfectly good holiday.” Solo and most of the other militia members who intend to march on Washington aren’t planning on killing anyone. But I can’t help but wonder how can we distinguish those who are from those who aren’t? If I come upon a group of people dressed in fatigues, toting weapons, and ranting about the New World Order, how I am supposed to tell whether they belong to a slightly paranoid libertarian division of the militia, or a violently delusional, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic branch? A few months before the Hutarees were arrested, the supervisor of a town not far from Ann Arbor called upon two brigades of the Michigan Militia, including the Hutarees, to help find two missing residents. When this story came to light, my son saw a photo of one of the Hutarees and said, “Hey, I know her.” As it turned out, the woman’s stepson was my son’s high school classmate, and my son, who considers himself a socialist, sometimes engaged the boy in friendly discussions of their opposing political beliefs. The boy’s stepmother and father live in Manchester, a town I visit to browse for antiques, attend the chicken broil, and enjoy ice cream at the Dairy Queen beside the river, although the woman apparently joined the Hutarees after meeting several members at a Ron Paul rally right here in Ann Arbor. My son also knows the militia member who coordinated the search, having interviewed the man for an article he wrote for his school newspaper describing an event at which several hundred 9/11 Truthers gathered at the University of Michigan to publicize their theory that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job. I admire my son for engaging people so unlike himself in political discussions. But I hate to think of him getting in an argument with a rightwing extremist who is packing a weapon and believes that socialists are destroying our country and, as I heard on a podcast describing the reasons for the upcoming march, “the only way we can stop them is to make them stop.” Any group that sees a reason to “celebrate” the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing terrifies me. I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building. Although McVeigh wasn’t a member of the Michigan Militia, he did attend one of their meetings and practiced building bombs at a farm 120 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. At the time, Mark Koernke, aka “Mark from Michigan, the Voice of the Militia,” worked as a janitor at the U of M, where I teach, and in his off hours hosted a vitriolic radio show, which he used as a forum to support McVeigh’s incendiary views. The radio show was broadcast from Koernke’s hometown of Dexter, a quaint village a few miles up the river from Ann Arbor, where my then-husband and I would take our son to buy cider and homemade donuts. After the carnage in Oklahoma City and President Clinton’s exit from the White House, much of the militia activity in Michigan subsided. Koernke got sent to jail for fleeing the scene of a robbery he didn’t commit and resisting the efforts of police to question him. But the crazies still were out there. One afternoon in 2003, I was reading a book about a virulently racist and anti-Semitic hate group called the Christian Identity movement when I received a call from Zingerman’s Deli asking me to come downtown to finalize plans for my son’s bar mitzvah. I got in my car and, a few blocks from the restaurant, noticed Christian Identity bumper stickers on the truck in front of me. Then came the 2008 presidential campaign and the near collapse of the American economy, and the militias regained support, not only in towns to the north and west, but in the southeast corner of the state, around Ann Arbor and Detroit. The SMVM was quick to distance itself from the Hutarees; their spokesperson even hinted to me at the Tax Blast that he and his guys had a hand in alerting the FBI to the Hutarees’ agenda. But the anger and paranoia that fueled the resurgence of the militias didn’t evaporate overnight because a few extremists were arrested. Not long after the FBI took the Hutarees into custody, I tuned my laptop to the Intelligence Report, once again being broadcast from Dexter by Mark Koernke, who had served his sentence and was treating his listeners to the ominous click of a bullet being loaded in the chamber of a gun and warnings about his perimeter being secured and the first nine people who breached that perimeter being doomed. Libertarian militia members might welcome nonChristian members, but when I read on the Hutarees’ website that they were prepared to use the sword “to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t,” I wonder what they intended to “save” me and my Jewish and Muslim neighbors from. So, despite my desire to preserve the liberties granted by our Constitution, I can’t help but be grateful that the federal government does have the power to keep surveillance on extremists of all kinds and seems able to figure out which few members of which few militias are serious about wanting to assassinate police officers or shoot people like me who might wander into the woods while they are training for Armageddon. ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.52 2010-04-19T17:13:55Z 2010-08-23T22:38:33Z

Eileen ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.53 2010-04-19T17:31:46Z 2010-08-23T22:30:12Z

Eileen ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.54 2010-04-19T17:47:06Z 2010-08-23T22:27:29Z

Marian accompanied me to the militia's Tax Blast two Saturdays ago. A militia guy was teaching everyone to make fires using two sticks. That was pretty hard, but Marian managed to get some smoke signals going using a flint and...

Eileen ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.55 2010-08-25T02:38:51Z 2010-08-25T13:09:19Z

THE HUCKSTERS! THE HUCKSTERS! Here's how hooked on MAD MEN I am. On the last episode, Roger makes a cryptic remark about the agency going to work for Dr. Lyle Evans. No one on the show ... and none of...

Eileen THE HUCKSTERS! THE HUCKSTERS! Here's how hooked on MAD MEN I am. On the last episode, Roger makes a cryptic remark about the agency going to work for Dr. Lyle Evans. No one on the show ... and none of the millions of viewers who seem to have googled "Dr. Lyle Evans" seem to get the reference. But the reference is to the maniacal soap company executive played by Sydney Greenstreet in the movie THE HUCKSTERS ... which is about an ad agency. I don't think the guy's name is exactly Dr. Evans, but it's close, and I'm pretty sure that's the reference. Do I get a cigar? A glass of Scotch? A melon?